Build your own SOIC progamming clip

[Pyra] was looking for a way to reprogram some ATtiny13 microcontrollers in a SOIC package. He’s re-engineering some consumer electronics so adding an ISP header to the design isn’t an option. He had been soldering wires to the legs of every chip but this is quite tedious. What he needs is an adapter that can make physical contact with the legs just long enough to program new firmware. After looking around he discovered that a PCI socket can be used as a progamming clip (translated). It shares the same pitch as a standard SOIC package but is not wide enough for the chip. He cut out 4 rows of the socket and the section of motherboard it was soldered to. Then he made a cut down the middle of the plastic and bent the two sections apart. The image above illustrates this, but not shown are the eight wires that he later added to connect to the device.

We wonder if this can be adapted to program SOIC parts without removing them from a circuit board. That would be a handy tool for finishing up the LED lightbulb hack.

@Spork This clip needs the IC pins to reside inside itself. It will not work with a mounted chip, it must be removed/standalone first. (the IC legs snuggle inside the space where the springy contacts go back inside the header)

I spent ages trying to do something like this, glueing wires to mini pegs and such. I even tries ‘casting’ chips in polymorph and poking wires into the mould. In the end I came up with an easier method: loop ‘kylar’ wire (wire wrap wire) around the pin, then twist the loop tight. Then I made sure the wire couldn’t move and brush another pin, by covering in hot glue. Now I can attach things to the pins of a soldered chip with small pins :>

I recently needed to program some ATtiny13s for a Halloween project (animatronic squid hat), and found myself needing a similar solution. I built this little attiny13 socket by forming a lump of sculpty thermosetting plasticine, then pressing the top of the SOIC chip in to it, leaving a negative of the pins and chip shape. I then used a small needle to carve out two little flattened holes through which ribbon cable could be threaded up, and stripped the ends of the cable, running each little wire through the impression’s the ICs legs had left.

I hooked this all up to some header pins, and reversed it around, so it essentially adapts an upside down attiny13 soic in to a right-way-up 8 pin dip, perfect for breadboarding, or plugging in to a little metaboard avr programmer shield I built. :)